Post notification sends to registered subscribers but not public subscribers

When I test join as a public subscriber, I don’t get any confirmation email and I don’t get any post notices.
The post notices are going out but only to registered subscribers.
How can I turn it on for public subscribers or why isn’t it working for them but it does for registered subscribers?

With a fully structured site and plugins, it’s some work to eliminate every plugin and slowly add them back. I’ll try but I really thought that if it works for registered subscribers it should work for public without me doing a bunch of testing. It doesnt seem to be the type of problem that’s on my side.

You aren’t the first and won’t be the last to think like that but Subscribe2 is a relatively simple plugin of less than 7000 lines of code (WordPress by comparison is over 350,000 lines of code).

Subscribe2 works fine on my sites so the only differences between our two setups are the other plugins, the theme and the server configuration. In the vast majority of cases that is where the issue lies.

Ok I’ve narrowed the problem, not to the sending of post notices, but to the verification email sent to public subscribers.
But, the verification email does go out with no plugins active and using twentytwelve theme.
It does not go out with my Agency theme by Themify, and no plugins active.
So it’s not that it won’t send notices to subscribers. But it won’t send verifications to public subscribers so they will turn from red to gray and become active.
I guess I can’t use Subscribe2

This could be due to incorrect installation of Subscribe2. A good number of first time users write their own ‘welcome’ page and redirect the initial form to that page where this is not necessary, Subscribe2 handles the ‘welcome’ message for you. If you must do it that way you need to have the Subscribe2 form or widget available on the page you wrote for your site.

If you can provide a link to the subscription page on your site I can have a look and see if this might be the case on your site.

I didn’t write anything. I just installed it. It pops up after about 5 seconds and I had it in another browser. I entered a different email address and subscribed. I did this twice from different browsers. Both showed in the subscriptions area in red. I never got a confirmation email to those addresses. Only when I turned all plugins off and switched to twentytwelve and tried again with a third email address. I got a confirmation that time. But I turned my theme back on, with no plugins active, and I didn’t get the confirmation again. I uninstalled it for now. I may try again in the future.
To be clear, everything worked fine with registered subscribers. But public subscribers require a confirmation email response. The reason the public subscribers didn’t get post notices is that they weren’t confirmed.